Counselling
What should I expect from counselling?
Counselling can be daunting – especially for couples. Partners are often afraid that the counsellor will take sides, that the blaming happening in your relationship will happen in counselling. That your partner is going to expose something about you that you don't want to talk about.
We are here to support both of you. To help you to talk honestly and get to those things that are meaningful between you. Couples report that in counselling they have been able to talk more intimately, that they feel safer to discuss what is important to them and that they are able to change destructive patterns.
Learning about your patterns is an important part of couples counselling
Relationships are developmental
In other words when we start out our relationships have an immature quality and we have to learn skills for a more mature relationship. Think of relationships you may have had when you were a teenager vs in your 20's and perhaps older. Each time we become involved in a relationship we tend to go through the same stages as we develop and mature. We can learn a lot about ourselves in relationship when we understand the nature of these stages. Below are some differences between an early stage or immature relationship and a mature relationship.
Early Stage/Immature Relationships |
|
Mature Relationships |
| Little conflict and avoidance of conflict Lack of distinction between partners and tendency to merge boundaries. Tendency towards infatuation, and romantic fantasies. Similarities between partners are important. Believe they are responsible for each others happiness. |
Partners are open and honest with each other. Partners manage emotional reactions during disagreements. Partners can tolerate anxiety and conflict. Can express their needs and opinions to one another. Partners are supported in their independent life goals |
Focus of couples therapy
What to consider in doing couples therapy
You will get the most out of therapy if you
- Develop clear objectives for therapy and the kind of life you want to build together
- Work on your blocks to becoming the kind of partner you aspire to be
- Have the motivation to persist
- Develop the perspective that you are allies.
- Respect what your partner identifies as their blocks. Learn to be curious about their experience.
- Accept that conflict produces growth and learning to manage inevitable disagreements is the key to more harmonious relationships.
- Time to review progress and identify the next step.
Things that get in the way of improving your relationship
Not giving it time
Change is hard for you and your partner. Change occurs in small increments. Understanding that you both have difficult habits to change will go a long way. It takes effort to stay conscious and improve your reactions to each other.
Focusing on what your partner needs to do differently
You can influence each other, but that doesn’t mean you can change each other. Becoming a more effective partner will go a long way to creating change in your relationship. Waiting for your partner to do something different before you do, creates a stalemate. Both of you need to be working to nurture your relationship.
Focusing on solutions
It is more productive to change how you think and feel about something. This will have more effect on changing how you respond than identifying what to do. We tend to have a clear idea about what we need to do differently. The hard question is why don’t we do it ? .
Avoiding emotional discomfort
If you strive to always feel emotionally safe in your relationship you and your relationship will become dull and lack life. We want our partner to change so we don’t have to feel the emotional discomfort of feeling our reactions to what annoys us. No-one feels comfortable about facing their fears, or taking the risk to speak from the heart when the stakes are high, but it is the time we learn the most.
Being unprepared for sessions
This is typically in the form of not knowing what you want to work on which can lead to talking about what is most on someone’s mind or going over the last fight you had. Both of these are unproductive. What is useful before each session is to reflect on your objectives for therapy and what is the next step that supports these objectives.
So in therapy we
Develop a clear picture of each person's experience and position to the problem
A large part of difficulties in relationships is communication. What this comes down to is not effectively getting across your message to each other. A good deal of time in therapy is becoming clear about what you are trying to say to each other. This can sometimes make all the difference. As each partner's experience is explored you become clearer to yourself as well as your partner. Being able to express your experience and take in your partner's experience is what we call 'differentiation'. A second problem in communication is the emotional reactions that get in the way of expressing ourselves. So a large part of therapy is exploring and helping to manage these reactions.
Explore the patterns and sensitivities you have to each other
Sensitivities develop as a result of the emotional pain you are carrying from past experiences. The hurt and betrayal you feel from these experiences make you 'sensitive' to the possibility this could happen again. Couples will often go into blaming each other when these sensitive feelings arise. Learning to deal with your own feelings, sensations and reactions is an important part of therapy.
Challenge our assumptions and expectations of one another
It is likely you have faulty assumptions about your partner and they do you. It is impossible to be in an inter-dependent relationship without being judgmental or being judged. We have to learn to deal with our reactions not expect our partner to be perfect so we don't have to feel criticized or ignored. It is learning to repair breaches that is possible, not trying to create a relationship where they never happen.
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